I think the root of this issue is that some 80% of the unique hero features feel almost superficial or way too niche under most circumstances.
As a whole the "hero pool" is honestly kind of odd:
- You can reroll all their abilities and signature skills immediately, so those don't matter.
- The affinity points barely change anything in the long run, the total output of assigning a governor is usually less than that of a single building.
- Their gear is always very outdated so it needs replacing 90% of the time. The only time I keep the original gear that a hero is wearing is if I have nothing else for the slot.
So to summarize, the only thing that I generally care about in a hero is their special abilities and to some extent their preloaded transformations if they come from some free city with good ones (but those are somewhat rare in my experience).
This means that the majority of the time when I pick a hero it's "because I need a new hero" and not because they are particularly interesting. Sure I've had some rounds where they all were slam dunks, but that's an outlier.
Finding some way to make heroes interesting other than the fact that they are heroes would be a great start to fixing this issue.